By now it’s a cliché, though often a useful one, to allow a particular song to remind you of a certain time or place – that summer fling at the beach, that interminable drive to your grandmother’s, that drug-addled suicide attempt…

Usually in those situations, you can actually remember both the time and the song. The other day, however, with iTunes on shuffle and my thoughts distracted by some dude I never heard of trying to “friend” me on Facebook, I was suddenly transported back to 1981 and a long bus ride to a basketball playoff game with a gaggle of cheerleaders. (Such was frequently my fate in high school, as anyone who read my sadsack entry in Popdose’s “Songs for the Dumped” series might recall.) The trouble was, while the memory was crystal clear in an instant, I had no clue what the song was for a full minute, until the chorus at long last kicked in.

Thus was I re-introduced to Franke & the Knockouts’ “Sweetheart” (download), a Top 10 hit from that spring of ’81. A few notes of that overly bright keyboard intro, a line or two of Franke Previte’s vocals straining to break free of the song’s vice-like MOR grip, and an entire pop-radio playlist springs instantly to mind: “Morning Train,” “Kiss on My List,” “Keep on Loving You,” “Woman,” “Being With You,” “The Best of Times,” Stanley Clarke & George Duke’s “Sweet Baby,” the Alan Parsons Project’s “Time” … “The One That You Love” (I didn’t say it was a great playlist). The sound is somehow indelible, lodged in that time when disco was dead (except for Kool & the Gang), so was John Lennon, the charts were unbelievably tame, and the Next Cool Thing was hiding somewhere in England, in Minneapolis, or in Athens, Georgia.

Why did I buy a copy of “Sweetheart”? I don’t remember, but it probably had something to do with that bus ride and whichever cheerleader I was pointlessly obsessing over at the time. Nevertheless, my hard-earned $1.19 (the sticker’s still on the sleeve) contributed to the rapid rise of Mr. Previte, who — after knocking around for a decade with two different bands, to no great artistic or financial end — formed a third one, got signed and scored three Top 40 hits within 15 months. (Those other two bands? The Boston-based Oxford Watch Band — hello, late ’60s! — and a heavy-metal act called Bull Angus. Who knew Franke & the Knockouts were actually Spinal Tap?)

“Sweetheart” was the first of them; like the others, it was co-written by Previte and Knockouts guitarist Billy Elworthy. Its lyric was rather sticky, with some deliciously stupid bits (my favorite being the verse that starts with a Telly Savalas “Who loves you, baby?” and goes on to proclaim that “You’re the funk in my life/Yeah, day and night.” As a bonus, it was accompanied by one of those early videos that were too obvious by half — see if you can spot the allusion to the band’s name — and fairly screamed “We don’t know what the hell to do with this new medium!” (more…)